Not sure what has happened here but worth a note of caution;Those pots are quite delicate, the weak link is those tiny rivets that hold the lugs. The connection between lugs and pads is only via contact pressure of rivet so just bending those solder lugs can make the connection intermittent and as mentioned overheating will weaken the rivet pressure on the joint.

If the lug can be moved from side to side then the rivet has lost it's grip and a high chance you will have trouble. I've revived a few simply by repressing the rivets. (Delicately of course)

If the pot is just scratchy then that is the pad to wiper connection failing or dirty, cleaner may help for a while but I've found if you have it apart you may as well replace it.

FWIW, I wrap a short piece of masking tape around the outside of the back cover which helps to keep blobs of solder and crap out of the working internal parts.It also stops small insect critters from setting up house,,, you would be surprised where critters find homes Hope it helps, Phil.

Politics is the art of so plucking the goose as to obtain the most feathers with the least squawking. - R.G. 2011Jeez, she's an ugly bastard, she makes my socks hurt. I hope it's no ones missus here. - Ice-9 2012

That was from a Strat that our guitarist bought very cheap, he asked me if I could have a look at it!

The switch worked after a clean but the pots went straight into the bin. It had an expensive set of pickups in that were worth several times what he'd paid for the whole guitar. They are now in one of his gigging guitars and some cheap ass pups went into that one.

Politics is the art of so plucking the goose as to obtain the most feathers with the least squawking. - R.G. 2011Jeez, she's an ugly bastard, she makes my socks hurt. I hope it's no ones missus here. - Ice-9 2012

To be honest, I've never had a pot fail on me by going short-circuit, the ones that have failed on me have always gone open-circuit, there's at least two failure-modes I've seen in pots so far:

1, The solder lugs go lose where they're riveted to the resistive carbon track ends, and wiper connection on the phenolic substrate, the funny thing is I've noticed that certain values of pots seem to be more susceptible to this failure-mode than other values, the riveted joints tend to go lose due to heat-stress from overheating when soldering.

2,The carbon coating on the resistive track Flakes-off, due to the age of the pot or just mechanical wear, sometimes the flaking is enough to render the carbon track open-circuit.

My two cents worth.....

Genius is not all about 99% perspiration, and 1% inspiration - sometimes the solution is staring you right in the face.-Frequencycentral.